i-am.ws

Last seven years I've been building a large web application that is doing a lot of image manipulation. When I say large, we're talking here about fifty thousand lines of code. To achieve that the only way is to script and automate all the image processing. Where my web front-end is in Perl, the back-end is 100% based on the Linux netpbm tools (get it here). And if netpbm is missing some functionality that I require, then I will typically develop a new netpbm tool and contribute it to the package (that's how pamwipeout and pamrubber came into being).

After thirty years the netpbm package is now pretty substantial in size. So for creating a tool that is small and rather custom it is often easier if you don't need to do the full netpbm install and build. But you will need your own code to read, analyze and write your PNM files. And of course in those cases I don't submit the results to sourceforge.

As an example, these two images one with blue fan parts (air intake in the datacenter cold aisle) and the other with red ones (fan exhaust in the hot aisle). Often I have only one of the two pictures and I need to convert it. At first I would use Gimp to manually convert from one to the other – or vice versa – but automating it makes the process much faster and less error prone.

The transformation here is a simple process of finding the blue pixels and then changing the hue (hue/saturation/value) to red. The procedure is to convert r/g/b to h/s/v, then shift the hue from blue to red and convert back to r/g/b. A not too complex operation and a nice opportunity to bring out my home grown netpbm code. When it is for only a custom single purpose you can typically simplify things a lot, like only doing 8-bit PPM and skipping PBM, PAM, etc. Plus skipping a lot or error validation. In this case resulting in just 500 lines of code, not too bad.

This program is only meant as an example framework and therefore named ppm2ppm. After extending it with your own functionality, you should of course rename it to something more meaningful like in this case maybe "ppmblue2red". Btw where the official netpbm tools are typically using "to" in their names (like pamtopng), I try not to do that in my home-grown NetPBM programs, using a "2" instead to distinguish things.